Problem for me is where retro begin and hoarding end? I lived and worked around bike shops during the heydays of MTBs (1992-1997), shops stuffed with Kleins and Pace and the like and these were the bikes that I always wanted and bought bits when I could. But after this time bikes became more generic, more Eastern, more boring....
Anyway, strangly (for someone who was working in the bike trade at the time) mine really came from a loathing of Shimano stuff and being a tight-wad. I hated the way shimano changed every year and that the scene was 'if you don't have the most up to date kit, you're not cool'. At the same time suspension was really kicking in and again, I hated the 'all change every year. I looked back at what had passed and saw that shops like Recycle in Penge were stuff to the ceiling with kit that had cost a small fortune only a year earlier and this was kit that was truely amazing: fillet brazing, CNC - stuff built in sheds by blokes with beards called Doug or Keith or Adrian, rather than some marketing bolloks dreamed up by a guy called Zack with a pony-tail who spent more on a manicure than I earnt in a year and so began my passion.
From the early 90s I'd always bought what I thought were cool bikes (Dave Lloyd, Funk, Titan with graftons, cooks and so on), never bought new but from team guys or shop sales, but had sold them on so that I could upgrade and had ended up with one of the last Santa Cruz bontragers pre Trek (my first brand new frame direct from Colin at Trek), this then went in favour of a San Andy with BAM Z1 etc, a beautiful bike but an embodiment of what I now disliked - shimano, suspension, all the gear and no idea.
So I swapped my San Andreas (which was relatively new and not at all retro at the time) with a Fat Ti and a set of RC30s from Vince at Recycle. The M900 and the hope discs went in favour of a Prescion Billet groupset and a set of Cooks. None of this cost me very much at all but was certainly the best move ever. I was now totally free of Shimano and suspension and the fashion that had infected mountain bikes.
Slowly but surely this kit and the box loads of original stuff I still had from prior builds became more and more popular, to a point where Scant, Jez, Webby, Dunc and theboy and I were all basically sending and receiving stuff on a regular basis via STW (with the use of the word RETRO before any post) and the rest is history...
